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Making E-commerce Smarter

Jan Nugent CIO interview

Nogin awarded the CIO Review’s “Most Promising eCommerce Technology Solutions Providers of 2021”

This article originally appeared in CIO Review and is reproduced here with permission.

“From a technology perspective, there is a great divide in e-commerce,” highlights Jan-Christopher Nugent, co-founder and CEO of Nogin, an Intelligent Commerce Company that is helping brands improve their performance by providing a new approach to e-commerce software and a host of outsourced services. On one end of the spectrum, there is legacy enterprise e-commerce software that is robust, scalable, and has massive capabilities but is inflexible, slow and expensive to deploy, and very rigid to optimize.

On the other end, there are nimble SMB e-commerce storefront solutions that leverage apps to be effective for simpler stores but have fundamental architectural issues that make them unsuitable for enterprises. “For brands and retailers, providing an exceptional experience to the consumer is a must. However, keeping pace and maintaining reasonable profit margins has been a challenge for the market. Nogin solves that with our unique Commerce as a Service approach to the market,” avers Nugent. The Tustin, CA-based company offers a cloud-based, full-stack, e-commerce platform that includes R&D, sales optimization, and machine learning, so stores drive exponential results. For those who need more, Nogin also provides artificial intelligence-driven marketing, fulfillment, and expert support to help global brands keep pace with big retail giants and drive predictable profitability.

The Nogin Intelligent Suite features superior catalog and full-stack capabilities, a market-leading algorithm, and AI advancements at its core. Nogin blends enterprise-class technology with the flexibility and nimbleness of a commercial solution on the front-end to deliver customers the high-performing, seamless online experience they demand while liberating margins and driving growth. The Nogin Data Scientists, along with AI, process millions of interactions, analyze activity across a brand’s entire operation, and have the potential to act in real-time to help businesses unlock growth, cut costs and identify the source of lost revenues.

“Today brands and retailers are on an island once they replatform, and it’s not really working. With Nogin’s cloud technology and services approach, all boats rise with the tide. We are driving the tech to grow sales, cut shipping, returns, fulfillment costs, and push those capabilities out to all clients,” adds Nugent. Nogin’s high-performing, multi-tenant, and multi-community Intelligent Core feature flexible architecture designed to efficiently manage e-commerce operations, complex catalogs, and sophisticated order management systems to power a business’ day-to-day operations.

Additionally, Nogin’s Commerce as a Service cloud approach constantly invests in R&D, thereby eliminating the need for clients to ever replatform. Nogin’s proprietary software continuously updates with new features for advancement and better results. Imagine getting an update that increases your conversion rate by 20% overnight. With Nogin, it is a reality. Brands and retailers that partner will Nogin can drive consistent and predictable profitability because the platform provides access to all the resources a brand needs. The solution unlocks benchmarks, best practices, and behavioral data with no hidden or extra cost while combining customer, industry, and market intelligence, all wrapped in one platform that gets smarter after every conversion.

Over the last seven years, Nogin has helped notable brands, including Hurley, Bebe, Justice, ModCloth, and Karen Kane, not only meet their goals but exceed expectations in all facets of their e-commerce business operations. For example, a Fortune 500 client needed to launch eight stores globally with multi-currency, multilingual, and omnichannel capabilities. Working with a traditional enterprise provider would have cost them approximately $20 million and taken over two years to roll out globally. Instead, by plugging into Nogin’s intelligent e-commerce platform, they developed multiple region and language-specific catalogs, with 11 different unique payment methods—all managed from a single catalog.

“The brands went live globally in 90 days on Intelligent Commerce across the entire online demand chain for 5% of standard fees and with the help of Nogin’s experts do over $100MM online. We are now helping them roll out additional divisions”, says Nugent. In the last five years alone, Nogin has grown 1100% profitability. The company will continue to drive Commerce as a Service for brands and retailers to drive exponential results over DIY and Legacy Commerce. “Our goal is to continue to advance our Intelligent Commerce Platform and spin-off apps of high touch technology to drive exponential results for the SMB market as well,” concludes Nugent.

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